II
* * *
Eadem mutata resurgo.
(Though changed, I shall arise the same.)
Epitaph of Jakob Bernoulli,
Swiss pioneer of fluid dynamics
and spiral mathematics
Chapter 18
* * *
I drove down to Virginia that afternoon. It was a long ride but I told myself that I wanted time to open up the car’s engine, to let it cut loose after its time off the road. As I drove, I tried to sort through what had happened in the last two days, but my thoughts kept coming back to the remains of my daughter’s face resting in a jar of formaldehyde.
I spotted the tail after about an hour, a red Nissan four wheel drive with two occupants. They kept four or five vehicles behind but when I accelerated, so did they. When I fell back they kept me in view for as long as they could, then they began to fall back too. The plates were deliberately obscured with mud. A woman drove, her blond hair pulled back behind her and sunglasses masking her eyes. A dark–haired male sat beside her. I put them both in their thirties but I didn’t recognize them.
If they were feds, which was unlikely, then they were lame. If they were Sonny’s hired killers, then it was just like Sonny to hire cheap. Only a clown would use a 4WD for a tail, or to try to take out another vehicle. A 4WD has a high center of gravity and rolls easier than a drunk on a slope. Maybe I was just being paranoid, but I didn’t think so.
They didn’t make a move and I lost them in the back–roads between Warrenton and Culpeper as I headed toward the Blue Ridge. If they came after me again, I’d know: they stood out like blood in snow.
As I drove, sunlight speared the trees, causing the weblike cocoons of caterpillars to glisten. I knew that, beneath the strands, the white bodies of the larvae were twisting and writhing like victims of Tourette’s syndrome as they reduced the leaves to brown lifelessness. The weather was beautiful and there was a kind of poetry to the names of the towns that skirted Shenandoah: Wolftown, Quinque, Lydia, Roseland, Sweet Briar, Lovingston, Brightwood. To that list could be added the town of Haven, but only if you decided not to spoil the effect by actually visiting it.
It was raining heavily by the time I reached Haven. The town lay in a valley southeast of the Blue Ridge, almost at the apex of a triangle formed with Washington and Richmond. A sign at the limits read, A Welcome in the Valley, but there was little that was welcoming about Haven. It was a small town over which a pall of dust appeared to have settled that even the driving rain seemed unable to dislodge. Rusting pickups sat outside some of the houses, and apart from a single fast food joint and a convenience store attached to a gas station, only the weak neon of the Welcome Inn bar and the lights of the late–night diner opposite beckoned the casual visitor. It was the sort of place where, once a year, the local Veterans of Foreign Wars got together, hired a bus, and went somewhere else to commemorate their dead.
I checked into the Haven View Motel at the outskirts of the town. I was the only guest and a smell of paint hung around the halls of what might once have been a considerable house but had now been converted into a functional, anonymous three–story inn.
“Second floor’s being redecorated,” said the clerk, who told me his name was Rudy Fry. “Have to put you upstairs, top floor. Technically, we shouldn’t be accepting guests at all but …” He smiled to indicate the big favor he was doing me by letting me stay. Rudy Fry was a small overweight man in his forties. There were long–dried yellow sweat stains under his arms and he smelled vaguely of rubbing alcohol.
I looked around. The Haven View Motel didn’t look like the sort of place that would attract visitors in the best of times.
“I know what you’re thinkin’,” said the clerk, his smile revealing sparkling dentures. “You’re thinkin’, ‘Why throw good money away by decoratin’ a motel in a shit hole like this?’ ” He winked at me before leaning over the desk conspiratorially. “Well, I’m tellin’ you, sir, it ain’t gonna be a shit hole much longer. Them Japanese is comin’ and when they do, this place is gonna be a gold mine. Where else they gonna stay round here?” He shook his head and laughed. “Shit, we gonna be wipin’ our asses with dollar bills.” He handed me a key with a heavy wooden block chained to it. “Room twenty–three, up the stairs. Elevator’s busted.”
The room was dusty but clean. A connecting door led into the room next door. It took me less than five seconds to break the lock with my pocketknife, then I showered, changed, and drove back into town.
The recession of the seventies had hit Haven hard, putting an end to what little industry there was. The town might have recovered, might have found some other way to prosper, had its history been other than it was, but the killings had tainted it and the town had fallen into decay. And so, even after the rain had sluiced its way over the stores and streets, over the people and the houses, over trees and pickups and cars and Tarmac, there was no freshness about Haven. It was as if the rain itself had been sullied by the contact.
I stopped in at the Sheriff’s Office but neither the sheriff nor Alvin Martin was available. Instead, a deputy named Wallace sat scowling behind the desk and shoveling Doritos into his mouth. I decided to wait until the morning in the hope of finding someone more accommodating.
The diner was closing as I walked through the town, which left only the bar or the burger joint. The interior of the bar was ill lit, as if it was expending too much power on the pink neon sign outside. The Welcome Inn: the sign glowed brightly, but the interior seemed to give the lie to the sign.
Some kind of bluegrass music was playing over a speaker, and a TV above the bar was showing a basketball game with the volume turned down, but no one seemed to be listening or watching anyway. Maybe twenty people were scattered around the tables and the long, dark wood bar, including a mountainous couple who looked like they’d left the third bear with a baby–sitter. There was a low tide of conversation, which ebbed slightly when I entered, although it refused to cease entirely, and then resumed at its previous level.
Near the bar, a small knot of men lounged around a battered pool table, watching a huge, heavy–set man with a thick dark beard playing an older man who shot pool like a hustler. They eyed me as I walked by but continued playing. No conversation passed between them. Pool was obviously a serious business in the Welcome Inn. Drinking wasn’t. The hard men around the pool table were all clutching bottles of Bud Light, the real drinker’s equivalent of a club soda and lime.
I took an empty stool at the bar and asked for a coffee from a bartender whose white shirt seemed dazzlingly clean for such a place. He studiously ignored me, his eyes seemingly intent on the basketball game, so I asked again. His glance moved lazily to me, as if I were a bug crawling on the bar and he had just had his fill of squashing bugs but was wondering whether he couldn’t squash one more for the road.
“We don’t do coffee,” he said.
I glanced along the bar. Two stools down an elderly man in a lumber jacket and a battered Cat cap sipped at a mug of what smelled like strong black coffee.
“He bring his own?” I inquired, gesturing with a nod down the bar.
“Yep,” said the bartender, still looking at the TV.
“A Coke’ll do. Right behind your knees, second shelf down. Don’t hurt yourself leaning over.”
For a long time it seemed he wasn’t going to move, then he shifted slowly, leaned down without taking his eyes from the screen, and found the opener on the edge of the counter by instinct. Then he placed the bottle in front of me and set an iceless glass beside it. In the mirror behind the bar, I saw the amused smiles of some of the other patrons and heard a woman’s laugh, low and boozy with a promise of sex in it. In the mirror over the bar, I traced the laugh to a coarse–featured woman in the corner, her hair huge and dark. Beside her, a stout man whispered sour somethings in her ear like the cooings of a sick dove.
I poured the drink and took a long swig. It was warm and sticky and I felt it cleave to my palate, my tongue, and my teeth. The bartender spent a while idly polishing glasses with a bar towel that looked like it had last been cleaned for Reagan’s inauguration. When he got bored with redistributing the dirt on the glasses he wandered back toward me and put the bar towel down in front of me.
“Passin’ through?” he asked, although there was no curiosity in his voice. It sounded more like advice than a question.
“Nope,” I said.
He took it in and then waited for me to say more. I didn’t. He gave in first.
“Whatcha doin’ here, then?” He looked over my shoulder at the pool players behind and I noticed that the sound of balls colliding had suddenly ceased. He smiled a big shit–eating grin. “Maybe I can” — he stopped and the grin got wider, his tone changing to one of mock formality — “be of some a–ssistance.”
“You know anyone named Demeter?”
The shit–eating grin froze and there was a pause.
“No.”
“Then I don’t believe you can be of any a–ssistance.”
I stood up to leave, placing two dollar bills on the counter.
“For the welcome,” I said. “Put it toward a new sign.”
I turned to find a small, rat–featured guy in a worn blue denim jacket standing in front of me. His nose was dotted with blackheads and his teeth were prominent and yellow–stained like walrus tusks. His black baseball cap was marked with the words Boyz N the Hood, but this wasn’t any logo John Singleton would have liked. Instead of homies, the words were surrounded by the hooded heads of Klan figures.
Beneath his denim jacket, I could see the word Pulaski under a seal of some sort. Pulaski was the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan and the site of an annual rally for Aryan crackers everywhere, although I bet the face of old Thom Robb, grand high ass–wipe of the Klan, must have just lit up at the sight of Rat Features and his pinched, subintelligent face arriving to take in the Pulaski air. After all, Robb was trying to make the Klan appeal to the educated elite, the lawyers and the schoolteachers. Most lawyers would have been reluctant to have Rat Features as a client, still less a brother in arms.
But there was probably still a place for Rat Features in the new Klan. Every organization needs its foot soldiers, and this one had cannon fodder written all over him. When the time came for the Boyz to storm the steps of the Capitol and reclaim the Jewnited States for their own, Rat Features would be in the front line, where he could be certain to lay down his life for the cause.
Behind him, the bearded pool player loomed, his eyes small, piggy, and dumb looking. His arms were enormous but without definition, and his gut bulged beneath a camouflage T–shirt. The T–shirt bore the legend Kill ‘em all — Let God sort ‘em out, but the big guy was no marine. He looked as close to retarded as you can get without someone coming by twice a day to feed you and clean up your mess.
“How you doin’?” said the Rat. The bar was quiet now and the group of men at the pool table were no longer lounging but stood rigid in anticipation of what was to come. One of them smiled and poked his neighbor with an elbow. Obviously, the Rat and his buddy were the local double act.
“Great till now.”
He nodded as if I’d just said something deeply profound with which he had a natural empathy.
“You know,” I said, “I once took a leak in Thom Robb’s garden.”
Which was true.
“It’d be better if you just got back on the road and kept driving, I reckon,” said the Rat, after a pause to figure out who Thom Robb was. “So why don’t you just do that?”
“Thanks for the advice.” I moved to go past him but his pal put a hand like a shovel against my chest and pushed me back against the bar by flexing his wrist slightly.
“It wasn’t advice,” said the Rat. He gestured back at the big guy with his thumb.
“This here’s Six. You don’t get back in your fuckin’ car now and start raisin’ dust on the highway, Six is gonna fuck you up bad.”
Six smiled dimly. The evolutionary curve obviously sloped pretty gently where Six came from.
“You know why he’s called Six?”
“Let me guess,” I replied. “There are another five assholes like him at home?”
It didn’t look like I was going to find out how Six got his name, because he stopped smiling and lunged past the Rat, his hand clutching for my neck. He moved fast for a man his size, but not that fast. I brought my right foot up and released it heel first onto Six’s left knee. There was a satisfying crunching sound, and Six faltered, his mouth wide with pain, and stumbled sideways and down.
His friends were already coming to his aid when there was a commotion from behind them and a small, tubby deputy in his late thirties pushed his way through, one hand on the butt of his pistol. It was Wallace, Deputy Dorito. He looked scared and edgy, the kind of guy who became a cop to give him some sort of advantage over the people who used to laugh at him in school, steal his lunch money, and beat him up, except he found that now those people still laughed at him and didn’t look like they’d let the uniform stand in the way of another beating. Still, on this occasion he had a gun and maybe they figured he was scared enough to pull it on them.
“What’s goin’ on here, Clete?”
There was silence for a moment and then the Rat spoke up. “Just some high spirits got out of hand, Wallace. Ain’t nothin’ to concern the law.”
“I wasn’t talking to you, Gabe.”
Someone helped Six to his feet and brought him to a chair.
“Looks like more than high spirits to me. I reckon you boys better come on down to the cells, cool off for a time.”
“Let it go, Wallace,” said a low voice. It came from a thin, wiry man with cold, dark eyes and a beard flecked with gray. He had an air of authority about him and an intelligence that went beyond the low cunning of his associates. He watched me carefully as he spoke, the way an undertaker might eye up a prospective client for his casket.
“Okay, Clete, but …” Deputy Dorito’s words trailed off as he realized there was nothing he could say that would matter to any of the men before him. He nodded to the crowd, as if the decision not to pursue things any further had been his to make.
“You’d better leave, mister,” he said, looking at me.
I stood up and walked slowly to the door. No one said anything as I left. Back at the motel, I rang Walter Cole to find out if anything had developed in the Stephen Barton killing, but he was out of the office and his machine was on at home. I left the number of the motel and tried to get some sleep.